quote:

Chapter 8 Ecological Causes of Unwelcome Change

Biotic Potential versus Carrying Capacity

In the next seven generations after the English clergyman-scholar Thomas Robert Malthus came to the dismal conclusions expressed in his 1798 “Essay on the Principle of Population,” millions of Britons emigrated to the New World. Nevertheless, during that time the resident population of Great Britain doubled, doubled again, and almost doubled a third time!

One contention in Malthus’s essay became widely known: “Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in an arithmetical ratio”1 Throughout the essay Malthus was referring to human population, and by subsistence he meant food. As we shall see, these conceptions were unduly narrow. But the really basic Malthusian principle is so important that it needs to be restated in the more accurate vocabulary of modern ecology. It states a relationship of inequality between two variables:

"The cumulative biotic potential of the human species exceeds the carrying capacity of its habitat."

No interpretation of recent history can be valid unless it takes these two factors and this relation between them into account, No one can truly understand the intensification of competition unless he grasps this principle. People whose political, religious, and ideological perspectives cause them to ignore these two variables will not succeed, even with the best of intentions, in improving the human condition.2

The phrase “biotic potential” refers to the total number of offspring a parental pair would be theoretically capable of producing. The cumulative biotic potential of the human species refers to the total number of people that could result after a series of generatfons if each generation fully exercised its reproductive power. The carrying capacity of the habitat, of course, is simply the maximum number of living individuals the available resources can indefinitely support. It is limited not just by the finite supply of food, but also by any other substance or circumstance that is indispensable but finite in quantity. The least abundant necessity will be the limiting factor; it may or may not be food. For industrially developed countries it began to appear in the 1970s that the limiting factor might be oil, while in some places it was water. It could be some other necessity.

For most of these seven generations, people fondly imagined that somehow Malthus had been proven wrong.3 With the vast territorial expanse of the New World, and with new agricultural technology to exploit it, plus new means of transportation and trade, and improved organization, we expanded food production more than Malthus would have dreamed possible. Nevertheless, the Malthusian principle still held. We were only able to suppose it was mistaken because our exceptional circumstances (in the Age of Exuberance) made us commit two oversights. First, because the existing population was for the time being appreciably less than the world’s suddenly augmented carrying capacity, we did not see the human relevance of the carrying capacity concept. Second, we failed to think about cumulative population. Until lately there always seemed to be room for the increment we expected next year, or in the next generation.

Charles Darwin was more perceptive. He recognized not only the Malthusian principle’s truth, but also its significance. It was the key insight he needed to unlock the riddle of evolution—and thus to lay the foundation upon which his successors could build the science of ecology.4 In effect, Darwin saw that the adjective “human” was unnecessary in the Malthusian principle, for the principle was not limited to one species. Darwin’s version of it (recast here in the ecological language of today) was universal rather than specific:

The cumulative biotic potential of any species exceeds the carrying capacity of its habitat.

As a result, there is competition among the members of a species population for use of resources that are in short supply relative to their numbers. Not all competitors will succeed; not every individual will live through all stages of the life cycle. The population, pressing on its limited resources, will suffer attrition.

The attrition of the population will not be random, however. Darwin saw that, since there are differences between individuals, some competitors will have, advantages (however slight) that others will lack. Those with advantages will be somewhat more likely to survive to reproductive age; they will be somewhat more successful in mating, reproducing, and providing care for their progeny. Thus they will, on the average, leave more descendants than those with disadvantages. Moreover, Darwin saw that what traits are advantageous and what traits are disadvantageous will depend on what environmental circumstances the organism must cope with. Environmental selection pressures, he realized, need not alter the traits of any individual. Evolution happens when environmental pressures merely influence comparative reproductive success. By influencing the comparative abundance of a particular organism’s descendants, the requirements imposed by the habitat influence the future prevalence of that organism’s inheritable traits among the total population.

The fact that evolution does operate shows that the Malthusian principle is valid. So, too, does the fact that there are food chains. If each species did not overreproduce, then predation would always lead to extinction of prey, the predatory species in turn would starve, and life would long since have vanished from the earth. Herbivores do not meticulously wait for seeds to ripen and fall before consuming the plants that bear them. Carnivores do not generously abstain from eating herbivores until the latter have replaced themselves with progeny. Every species that serves as another’s sustenance can endure only by virtue of a reproductive capacity sufficient to compensate for such attrition. The persistence of life in a world where organisms consume other organisms confirms the Malthusian principle. To deny that principle, as we have naively done, is to deny evidence all around us.

With self-restraint, humans have been able sometimes to harvest such things as timber, fish, or other useful species on a “sustained yield” basis.5 This fact should be seen as evidence for, not against, the Malthusian principle. Depletion of such resources by an overly prolific human species was never the only predictable result of the Malthusian principle. We supposed it was because we thought about the principle too anthropocentrically. Sustained yields represent reproduction in excess of replacement by the resource species; the excess is then “harvested” by an exploiting species—in this case, Homo sapiens. If Malthus were so wrong, there would have been no sustained yields of anything. In every bite of our daily bread there is a reminder of the wheat plant’s ability to produce more seeds than required for its own replacement.

One of the great ironies of history has been the notion that our species was somehow exempt from a principle that manifestly applies to all other species. Malthus stated the principle of reproduction in excess of carrying capacity for man in particular. Darwin later generalized it to cover all species, and went on to discern its evolutionary implications. In the years since Darwin, most non-biologists seem to have smugly reversed Malthus by “slightly amending” Darwin’s generalized version—accepting its application to all species except one, ourselves, the very species about which the principle was first asserted.

To be sure, man does differ from other animals, for man transmits to his descendants a cultural as well as a genetic heritage. The cultural heritage is conveyed socially rather than biologically—by symbolic language rather than by chemical code. It is thus more readily and deliberately mutable.6 Its mutations can sometimes be mothered by necessity rather than by random accident, and perhaps somewhat more of them can be adaptive rather than lethal. But for some time there have been more and more signs that this cultural heritage does not exempt our species from the full ramifications of population pressure in a finite habitat. The ratio of load to carrying capacity can change culture itself. We had supposed our difference from other species exempted us. [...] Some of the wistful remembrance of earlier times reflected the wish that we could go on supposing.

[...]

Environmental Brakes on Exuberance

Modern nations had staked their future on perpetual harvesting of supplies of non-renewable resources. Men now built with steel, concrete, or aluminum, rather than with wood. We had evolved into societies so large and complex that they required quantities of energy too vast to be supplied by contemporary crops of organic fuel. We allowed ourselves to become so numerous that we could not really grow the food we needed without enormous “energy subsidies,” augmenting sunlight and muscle power in agriculture with industrially produced chemical fertilizers and fuel-burning machinery for planting, cultivating, harvesting, shipping and processing.11 Americans thus were farming not only the great plains of Iowa and Nebraska but also the gas wells of Texas and Alaska and the oil wells of the continental shelf offshore. Even agriculture, the ultimate achievement in man’s development of the takeover method of carrying capacity expansion, had become converted to drawdown methods. The most “prosperous” nations were living on phantom carrying capacity but had not learned the concept. By using still more enormous quantities of energy for new occupations unrelated to agriculture, we put off recognizing that our population had outgrown its maintainable niches. Had people understood the ecological implications of the Industrial Revolution, it might have been seen not so much as a great step forward for mankind but, as we shall make clear in Chapter 10, as a tragic transition to human dependence on temporarily available resources.

To provide charcoal for iron smelting, the British in the eighteenth century had harvested their timber faster than it grew. Depletion of British forests led to increased coal mining.12 The need for pumping devices to remove water seeping into the mines provided the impetus for development of steam engines. Those engines could convert the chemical energy in a fuel such as coal into mechanical energy that could do useful work. In addition to working the pumps at the mines, other applications for steam engines were soon found, and they made great industrial expansion possible. Reliance on current photosynthesis (annual timber growth) was replaced by dependence on accumulated past photosynthesis (coal deposits). There was a rapid proliferation of coal-consuming machinery. As a result, Britain evolved an economy that traded British factory output for food and other agricultural products grown overseas. Those doublings of British population sine Malthus, and the exporting of British people to other lands around the world, were thus made possible by exchanging a way of life based on visible acreage for a way of life based on two levels of ghost acreage. By heavy use of fossil acreage, British industry produced the goods that gave Britain access to trade acreage.

So British exuberance since Malthus was no refutation of the Malthusian principle. By the drawdown method Britons merely postponed the day of reckoning. They lived beyond their energy income, harvesting timber on a faster-than-sustained-yield basis. Then they bought further time by exploiting ghost acreage—both overseas and underground. Despite such measures, only two hundred years after James Watt’s invention, the time Britain had thus bought seemed to be running out.13

Britain was the first nation to experience what economists came to call the “takeoff’ into supposedly self-sustaining economic growth. Long after the evidence had turned against the idea, the illusion persisted that a similarly brilliant destiny remained possible for all nations. This was partly due to economic theorists’ belief that the takeoff was a product of British accumulation of monetary savings in the form of profits from overseas trade.14 It depended, in fact, on the geological accumulation of energy savings in the form of coal deposits.15 In the last third of the twentieth century, although the vast majority of the world’s energy savings were still in the ground, the vast majority of the most accessible fraction of those savings had already been extracted and spent.

In the decades since World War II, all the leading industrial nations had plunged still more deeply into living on nature’s exhaustible legacy. Furthermore, they had committed themselves to technology that relied on the huge advantage petroleum had because it is liquid, whereas coal is solid. Consumption of petroleum products increased enormously, although petroleum was very much less abundant in the earth than coal. The relative share of energy obtained from coal diminished, and for some countries even the absolute amount declined. Many national economies made themselves deeply dependent on the continued sailing of growing fleets of supertankers. In the meantime, however, the volume of oil reserves discovered by each additional million feet of exploratory drilling was rapidly declining, despite expanded technical know-how. This showed us that we had already extracted and burned the most accessible supplies, and that the existing and still increasing rate of consumption would virtually exhaust even the less accessible reserves within the lifetime of people already living. The social repercussions were going to be staggering.

Many people refused to believe it, and national economic policies continued to be based on a myth of inexhaustibility. The coal miners’ strike in Britain in 1972 provided a temporary foretaste of the social and economic chaos that would have to come when a fuel-dependent world runs short of fuel.16 The Arab oil embargo the following year added a sharp reminder. Before retiring as prime minister, however, the characteristically indomitable Harold Wilson looked to future North Sea oil “production” as Britain’s economic savior—without acknowledging that salvation achieved by drawing down fossil acreage would have to be temporary.

Other mineral resources required by industry were also running shorter than people realized, were already probably operating as limits of the world’s rate of industrialization, and may even have been already limiting the productivity of existing industrial facilities. In the United States, for example, the number of pounds of copper obtained per ton of ore mined was by 1965 less than half what it was in 1925. Over those four decades, total copper production had almost doubled; this had obscured for an uncritical public the problems connected with a fourfold increase in ore extraction.17 Intensified efforts to secure such increasingly scarce resources could be expected to have serious social repercussions. Two cases will suffice to show the nature of the problem.

First, in Britain there were mounting worries over the likelihood that the remaining “amenity areas” of the country, such as Snowdonia National Park in Wales, would soon be devastated by strip mining for metallic ores needed by British and European industry.18 For many metals, the worlds richest ores had already been mined and smelted. Leaner ores had begun to be in increased demand. The leaner the ore being mined, the greater the volume of rock removed per ton of metal obtained. Even if the budget for mining operations were required to include provision for cleaning up and replanting after an area had been stripped, it would be impossible to restore the landscape characteristics that were imparted to Britain by the Ice Age. These were the features that contributed so much to the beauty of Britain’s northern countryside.

Second, in an effort to prevent white minority-ruled Rhodesia from establishing its independence in disregard of the full rights and aspirations of its large black majority, the United Nations had imposed economic sanctions upon that country. UN member nations were obliged to refrain from importing Rhodesian goods. But, faced with difficulty in obtaining from anywhere else (except Russia) adequate supplies of chromium needed for certain alloys, the United States government chose in 1972 to stop complying with the UN sanction. American firms resumed importing Rhodesian chrome.19 The American government decided to permit this in spite of strong internal pressure against giving aid and comfort to a regime internationally branded as racist.

If, as these examples show, advanced industrial nations with humane democratic traditions were thus pressed toward actions deeply deplored by many of their own citizens, it was clear that national economies were already feeling the pinch of ecological limits. These limits were the ultimate basis of some of the most revolutionary changes in our lives, particularly the rising sense of post-exuberant despair and oppression. The number of resources upon which our way of life depended for its continuation had been very greatly enlarged by the ecologically distinctive traits of modern humans. So the depletion of almost any one of many resources that were now essential could put the brakes on our neo-exuberance.

[...]

The Real Error

Malthus did indeed err, but not in the way that has been commonly supposed. He rightly discerned “the power of population” to increase exponentially “if unchecked.” He rightly noted that population growth ordinarily is not unchecked. He saw that it was worth inquiring into the means by which the exponential growth tendency is normally checked. He was perceptive in attaching the label “misery” to some of the ramifications of these means. Where he was wrong was in supposing that the means worked fully and immediately. (That this was his error has not been seen by those who reject his views.)

Being himself under the impression that it was not possible for the human load to exceed the earth’s carrying capacity, Malthus enabled those who came after him to go on misconstruing continued impressive growth as evidence against, rather than as-evidence for, his basic ideas. Carrying capacity was a concept almost clear to Malthus. He even sensed that the carrying capacities of earth’s regions had been repeatedly enlarged by human cultural progress.20 If he was not yet able to make clear to himself and his readers the distinction between means of enlarging carrying capacity and means of overshooting it, we do ourselves a serious disservice by perpetuating his shortcoming. And we do just such a disservice by continuing to mistake overshoot for progress, supposing drawdown to be no different from takeover. By erring thus we prolong and deepen our predicament.

Despite Malthus’s belief to the contrary, it is possible to exceed an environment’s carrying capacity—temporarily. Many species have done it. A species with as long an interval between generations as is characteristic of ours, and with cultural as well as biological appetites, can be expected to do it. Our largest per capita demands upon the world’s resources only begin to be asserted years after we are born. Resource depletion sufficient to thwart our children’s grown-up aspirations was not far enough advanced when our parents were begetting, gestating, and bearing us to deter them from thus adding to the human load.

By not quite seeing that carrying capacity can be temporarily overshot, Malthus understated life’s perils. He thus enabled both the admirers and the detractors of his admonitory writings to neglect the effects of overshoot—environmental degradation and carrying capacity reduction. In his analyses he assumed linear increase of carrying capacity. While this fell short of sustaining exponential growth of would-be consumers, it was, even so, a far brighter prospect than carrying capacity reduction.

Perry Mason Jar posted:

Goddammit no no loving Malthusian chat it's page four of the thread omg please

Rime posted:

Welcome to the end of the world.

Communist Thoughts posted:

start bombing factories

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

gently caress You And Diebold posted:

I wouldn't say it was amazing, but this book has a couple sections that have always stuck with me and only gotten more relevant. Especially this stretch of a dude going through a forest fire on future quaaludes

https://imgur.com/a/zxwH2Ff

Might have to do a full read through of it again, it's probably been at least a decade since I did last

Cold on a Cob posted:

Paradoxish posted:

We're going to get to live through the lovely and miserable decline while missing out on the catharsis of total collapse, or being too old to care. Worst of all worlds imo

Cascade Failure posted:

I, as well, already regret bookmarking this thread. Watched the dome video and found myself just kinda going "Yep, sounds about right".

To contribute, for extra lols check out this 1,000 page report from the prestigious (no, really) Geological Survey of Finland on replacing existing fossil fuels as an energy source: https://tupa.gtk.fi/raportti/arkisto/42_2021.pdf

From the abstract:

Lmao at the last sentence. hosed indeed and the author knows it lol.

silicone thrills posted:

Love to watch the accelerating collapse

https://twitter.com/ido_cohen2/status/1439863554606305286?s=19

Evil_Greven posted:

why go for something so exotic when the more familiar will do
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-97778-3

Rime posted:

I'm pretty sure I ate a probe back in 2018/19 for pointing out (fairly obviously) that the USA would have fully weaponized its southern border by 2050 and just gun down anyone crossing it.

I really wasn't expecting them to start rolling out the first stages of that before we were even into the 2020's. Those pictures are loving insane.

Cold on a Cob posted:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zpTIrx6uAA

the way the host just spits out "during rush hour traffic" when talking about some protestors in this clip made me lol a bit

then i got to this bit and went full lol. lmao.

that is a motorist on the m25 hitting somebody and [...] that's a price you think is worth paying. to, not only for a life to be lost, but for the impact that would have on a driver trying to go about their normal business. can you imagine the impact of that?"


lol. lmao.

and then the hosts attack the guy for not having his own home insulated yet. lollllllll

Derrick Jensen, Beyond Hope posted:

Derrick Jensen
Beyond Hope

https://orionmagazine.org/article/beyond-hope/

THE MOST COMMON WORDS I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re hosed. Most of these environmentalists are fighting desperately, using whatever tools they have — or rather whatever legal tools they have, which means whatever tools those in power grant them the right to use, which means whatever tools will be ultimately ineffective — to try to protect some piece of ground, to try to stop the manufacture or release of poisons, to try to stop civilized humans from tormenting some group of plants or animals. Sometimes they’re reduced to trying to protect just one tree.

Here’s how John Osborn, an extraordinary activist and friend, sums up his reasons for doing the work: “As things become increasingly chaotic, I want to make sure some doors remain open. If grizzly bears are still alive in twenty, thirty, and forty years, they may still be alive in fifty. If they’re gone in twenty, they’ll be gone forever.”

But no matter what environmentalists do, our best efforts are insufficient. We’re losing badly, on every front. Those in power are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and most people don’t care.

Frankly, I don’t have much hope. But I think that’s a good thing. Hope is what keeps us chained to the system, the conglomerate of people and ideas and ideals that is causing the destruction of the Earth.

To start, there is the false hope that suddenly somehow the system may inexplicably change. Or technology will save us. Or the Great Mother. Or beings from Alpha Centauri. Or Jesus Christ. Or Santa Claus. All of these false hopes lead to inaction, or at least to ineffectiveness. One reason my mother stayed with my abusive father was that there were no battered women’s shelters in the ’50s and ’60s, but another was her false hope that he would change. False hopes bind us to unlivable situations, and blind us to real possibilities.

Does anyone really believe that Weyerhaeuser is going to stop deforesting because we ask nicely? Does anyone really believe that Monsanto will stop Monsantoing because we ask nicely? If only we get a Democrat in the White House, things will be okay. If only we pass this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. If only we defeat this or that piece of legislation, things will be okay. Nonsense. Things will not be okay. They are already not okay, and they’re getting worse. Rapidly.

But it isn’t only false hopes that keep those who go along enchained. It is hope itself. Hope, we are told, is our beacon in the dark. It is our light at the end of a long, dark tunnel. It is the beam of light that makes its way into our prison cells. It is our reason for persevering, our protection against despair (which must be avoided at all costs). How can we continue if we do not have hope?

We’ve all been taught that hope in some future condition — like hope in some future heaven — is and must be our refuge in current sorrow. I’m sure you remember the story of Pandora. She was given a tightly sealed box and was told never to open it. But, being curious, she did, and out flew plagues, sorrow, and mischief, probably not in that order. Too late she clamped down the lid. Only one thing remained in the box: hope. Hope, the story goes, was the only good the casket held among many evils, and it remains to this day mankind’s sole comfort in misfortune. No mention here of action being a comfort in misfortune, or of actually doing something to alleviate or eliminate one’s misfortune.

The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.

Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying “Hope and fear chase each other’s tails,” not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is.

More or less all of us yammer on more or less endlessly about hope. You wouldn’t believe — or maybe you would — how many magazine editors have asked me to write about the apocalypse, then enjoined me to leave readers with a sense of hope. But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.

I’m not, for example, going to say I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just will. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish writing this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I do hope that the next time I get on a plane, it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means you have given up any agency concerning it. Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world. By saying that, they’ve assumed that the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.

I do not hope coho salmon survive. I will do whatever it takes to make sure the dominant culture doesn’t drive them extinct. If coho want to leave us because they don’t like how they’re being treated — and who could blame them? — I will say goodbye, and I will miss them, but if they do not want to leave, I will not allow civilization to kill them off.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive. We do whatever it takes.

When we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it. I would say that when hope dies, action begins.



PEOPLE SOMETIMES ASK ME, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just kill yourself?” The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really hosed, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really hosed. Life is still really good.

Many people are afraid to feel despair. They fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate our situation really is, they must then be perpetually miserable. They forget that it is possible to feel many things at once. They also forget that despair is an entirely appropriate response to a desperate situation. Many people probably also fear that if they allow themselves to perceive how desperate things are, they may be forced to do something about it.

Another question people sometimes ask me is, “If things are so bad, why don’t you just party?” Well, the first answer is that I don’t really like to party. The second is that I’m already having a great deal of fun. I love my life. I love life. This is true for most activists I know. We are doing what we love, fighting for what (and whom) we love.

I have no patience for those who use our desperate situation as an excuse for inaction. I’ve learned that if you deprive most of these people of that particular excuse they just find another, then another, then another. The use of this excuse to justify inaction — the use of any excuse to justify inaction — reveals nothing more nor less than an incapacity to love.

At one of my recent talks someone stood up during the Q and A and announced that the only reason people ever become activists is to feel better about themselves. Effectiveness really doesn’t matter, he said, and it’s egotistical to think it does.

I told him I disagreed.

Doesn’t activism make you feel good? he asked.

Of course, I said, but that’s not why I do it. If I only want to feel good, I can just masturbate. But I want to accomplish something in the real world.

Why?

Because I’m in love. With salmon, with trees outside my window, with baby lampreys living in sandy streambottoms, with slender salamanders crawling through the duff. And if you love, you act to defend your beloved. Of course results matter to you, but they don’t determine whether or not you make the effort. You don’t simply hope your beloved survives and thrives. You do what it takes. If my love doesn’t cause me to protect those I love, it’s not love.

A WONDERFUL THING happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope didn’t kill you. It didn’t even make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems — you ceased hoping your problems would somehow get solved through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself — and you just began doing whatever it takes to solve those problems yourself.

When you give up on hope, something even better happens than it not killing you, which is that in some sense it does kill you. You die. And there’s a wonderful thing about being dead, which is that they — those in power — cannot really touch you anymore. Not through promises, not through threats, not through violence itself. Once you’re dead in this way, you can still sing, you can still dance, you can still make love, you can still fight like hell — you can still live because you are still alive, more alive in fact than ever before. You come to realize that when hope died, the you who died with the hope was not you, but was the you who depended on those who exploit you, the you who believed that those who exploit you will somehow stop on their own, the you who believed in the mythologies propagated by those who exploit you in order to facilitate that exploitation. The socially constructed you died. The civilized you died. The manufactured, fabricated, stamped, molded you died. The victim died.

And who is left when that you dies? You are left. Animal you. Naked you. Vulnerable (and invulnerable) you. Mortal you. Survivor you. The you who thinks not what the culture taught you to think but what you think. The you who feels not what the culture taught you to feel but what you feel. The you who is not who the culture taught you to be but who you are. The you who can say yes, the you who can say no. The you who is a part of the land where you live. The you who will fight (or not) to defend your family. The you who will fight (or not) to defend those you love. The you who will fight (or not) to defend the land upon which your life and the lives of those you love depends. The you whose morality is not based on what you have been taught by the culture that is killing the planet, killing you, but on your own animal feelings of love and connection to your family, your friends, your landbase — not to your family as self-identified civilized beings but as animals who require a landbase, animals who are being killed by chemicals, animals who have been formed and deformed to fit the needs of the culture.

When you give up on hope — when you are dead in this way, and by so being are really alive — you make yourself no longer vulnerable to the cooption of rationality and fear that Nazis inflicted on Jews and others, that abusers like my father inflict on their victims, that the dominant culture inflicts on all of us. Or is it rather the case that these exploiters frame physical, social, and emotional circumstances such that victims perceive themselves as having no choice but to inflict this cooption on themselves?

But when you give up on hope, this exploiter/victim relationship is broken. You become like the Jews who participated in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising.

When you give up on hope, you turn away from fear.

And when you quit relying on hope, and instead begin to protect the people, things, and places you love, you become very dangerous indeed to those in power.

In case you’re wondering, that’s a very good thing.

Trabisnikof posted:

please we've had a plan to do this for over 70 years now

Epitope posted:

Obama is a prime case of using hope as a tool to manipulate and subvert. Still, if there's such a thing as a good human endeavor (how about environmentalism?), seems hope can be employed there too.

Doctor Jeep posted:

Stereotype posted:

lol this video is more than a year old? someone linked it here i'm not finding the post to quote it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zk11vI-7czE

the first part of this is amazing, the part mainly about how solar is fake. the end is all about how "biomass" is a huge scam. billions of subsidies stolen to massively incentivize doing tree agriculture to burn the trees. the scene with the cow and the horse i could have gone without seeing.

iirc there was a big negative reaction to this when it came out

quote:

A few left-wing journalists tried to push back on the attacks as well. But in almost every case, they were spiked by editors at ostensibly progressive journals. Christopher Ketcham, author of “This Land: How Cowboys, Capitalism, and Corruption are Ruining the American West,” was among those unable to find a venue in which to defend the documentary.

“I have come across very few editors radical enough to have the exceedingly difficult conversation about the downscaling, simplification, and the turn (in the developed world) toward diminished affluence that a 100 percent renewable energy system will necessarily entail,” Ketcham reflected to me. “You see, they have to believe that they can keep their carbon-subsidized entitlements, their toys, their leisure travel — no behavioral change or limits needed — and it will all be green and ‘sustainable.'”

[...]

Even mainstream environmentalists acknowledge that rising reliance on renewable energy “means a lot of dirty mining” to extract the minerals required for electric batteries and solar cells. This prospect has sparked excitement within the mining industry, with the editor of Mining.com, Frik Els, dubbing Green New Deal spokeswomen Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Greta Thunberg “mining’s unlikely heroines.”

“Going all in on the green economy and decarbonisation requires siding with the greens against fossil fuels,” Els informed fellow mining industry insiders. “It means selling global mining as the solution to climate change because mining metals is the only path to green energy and green transport.”

The inevitable rush on minerals required to power the green revolution has not exactly delighted residents of the Global South, however.

Evo Morales, the indigenous former president of Bolivia, was driven from power in 2019 by a military junta backed by the United States and local oligarchs, in what he branded a lithium coup. With the world’s largest untapped lithium resources, Bolivia is estimated to hold as much as half of the world’s reserves. Under Morales, the country guaranteed that only state-owned firms could mine the mineral.

The ousted socialist leader argued that multi-national corporations supported his right-wing domestic opponents in order to get their hands on Bolivia’s lithium – an essential element in the electric batteries that provide the cornerstone to a digital economy dependent on smartphones, laptops, and electric vehicles. “As a small country of 10 million inhabitants, we were soon going to set the price of lithium,” Morales said. “They know we have the greatest lithium reserves in the world [in a space of] 16,000 square kilometers.”

Just before the military coup in Bolivia, a report (PDF) by the World Economic Forum’s Global Battery Alliance reported that the global demand for electric batteries will increase 14-fold before 2030. Almost half of today’s lithium is mined to produce electric batteries, and the demand for the mineral will only rise as power grids incorporate high levels of battery powered tech and the demand for electric vehicles increases.

Electric batteries are also heavily reliant on cobalt, most of which is mined from Congo, and often in illegal and dangerous conditions by child labor. In December 2019, over a dozen Congolese plaintiffs sued Apple, Google’s Alphabet parent company, Microsoft, Dell, and Tesla, accusing them of “knowingly benefiting from and aiding and abetting the cruel and brutal use of young children in Democratic Republic of Congo (‘DRC’) to mine cobalt.”

This July, Tesla CEO and electric battery kingpin Elon Musk appeared to take partial credit for the 2019 military coup that forced Bolivia’s Evo Morales from power, asserting that big tech billionaires like him could “coup whoever we want.”

Basic Poster posted:

Lol




Lmao




https://www.businessinsider.com/carbon-capture-storage-expensive-climate-change-2021-9

Reverend Zero posted:

yeah i got a carbon

a carbon my fr*cken weed bowl

SKULL.GIF posted:

it would be Malthusian to suggest that number shouldn't go up

Rapacity posted:

i hate that we'll take everything down with us.

Lordshmee posted:

you know I think about this thread an awful lot. if things really are as bad as predicted, then I know sitting on this 401k is a joke. I mean, I’ve always known it’s a coin flip whether or not it’s a “correction” year when you near retirement anyway, and that’s without the end of the loving world driving number down.

so, I wonder A LOT about when, “the right time” is to cash it out, take the hit and do something fun while I still can. the real bitch is, I can’t even talk to anyone in real life about it, because everyone I know is too invested in the status quo to entertain such a notion as anything other than abject lunacy.

I think I can pay off my mortgage in about 5 years, living pretty frugal and socking everything I get into it. I figure if all I have to make is taxes and utilities until poo poo starts to fall apart for reals, then maybe….

hard thoughts.

lol.

lmao.

God Hole posted:

me, an urban planning master's student who is extremely passionate about the environment, about to graduate, and looking for literally any jobs that would allow me to direct my time & energy toward making the infrastructure of my city more resilient to a changing climate and increased frequency of extreme weather events (a city whose main freeway just turned into a canal for a week): "huh, these jobs don't seem to exist at all!"

The Protagonist posted:

Hubbert posted:

Homeless Friend posted:

his gimmick is freaking out then remembering he lives comfortably and settling down until the next big freakout.

bowser posted:

Figure 1. Appearance of the deposition and stratification of plastic materials in a Spanish canyon



Figure 2. Layering of plastic materials in an area of Southern Italy.



Figure 3. Detail of the plastic stratigraphy.

(source).

Archaeologists of the future will find all this useful when trying to answer the question "how did we mess up so bad?"

Cloks posted:

I'm reading 2052 because it was recommended in this thread and there's a whole lot of "we didn't do that and things are worse now" since this was published in 2012

A Terrible Person posted:

I'm honestly looking forward to what sort of Great Wall 2.0/Hyper Dome China throws together over the next couple of decades.

Not that it will actually work, but the effort would be impressive to watch.

JAY ZERO SUM GAME posted:

i haven't read the last 1500 posts

is it bad yet

quote:

Another few cases notwithstanding, the movement has by and large left property destruction an untried tactic. What if it became more than a one-off occurrence? What if hundreds or thousands followed in the footsteps of Reznicek and Montoya? On what grounds could that be cause for regret and condemnation? One might argue that it would open the dams of violence, or even ad lib terrorism. As for the former, Reznicek and Montoya hotly dispute that their actions fell into that category: ‘The oil being taken out of the ground and the machinery that does it and the infrastructure which supports it – this is violent’, Reznicek stated in an interview. ‘We never at all threatened human life. We’re acting in an effort to save human life, to save our planet, to save our resources. And nothing was ever done by Ruby or me outside of peaceful, deliberate and steady loving hands.’ In the Catholic Worker tradition, ennobled by the Berrigan brothers who used blood and napalm to destroy draft files during the Vietnam War and spoiled nuclear warheads during the late Cold War, righteous property destruction falls within the boundaries of non-violence.

The position has scriptural support. Jesus Christ was no stranger to the tactic: the Gospel of John tells us that he became so infuriated at the sight of money-changers raking in profit from selling cattle in the temple that he used ‘a whip of cords’ to drive them all out, before pouring out their coins and overturning their tables. Some support can also be found in secular philosophy. It has been argued that the similarity between breaking the bone of a child and breaking the bone of a table is deceptive: only the child can feel pain. Only she can be traumatised, only her dignity violated; the table is devoid of interests and mental states. Physical force that injures inanimate objects does not, on this view, count as violence, because it cannot have the results that constitute the prima facie wrongness of what we call violence. At a minimum, those on the receiving end must be sentient beings.

Far more common, however, is the opposite view. One much-cited philosophical essay says that violence ‘is always done, and it is always done to something, typically a person, animal, or piece of property’. The latter class of objects – windows, automobiles, places of business – might be subjected to breaking, burning, stone-throwing and an array of other violent acts. But what about the ordered demolition of a dilapidated house, or the controlled burning of a garden patch? To meet the criteria, the physical attacks damaging or destroying property have to be ‘highly vigorous, or incendiary, or malicious’, the latter the weightiest attribute. In a similar vein, Ted Honderich defines political violence as ‘a use of physical force that injures, damages, violates or destroys people or things, with a political and social intention’. Chenoweth and Stephan submit that ‘violent tactics include bombings, shootings, kidnappings, physical sabotage such as the destruction of infrastructure, and other types of physical harm of people and property’, which makes it even more impressive that they can name a single case of nonviolence. The fall of the Berlin Wall? People didn’t caress the cement.

But strategic pacifists are right in asserting that in the eyes of the public, in the early twenty-first century and particularly in the global North, property destruction does tend to come off as violent. Likewise, most people would think of a whip of chords as a weapon and the chasing away of money-changers and overturning of their tables as a minor whirlwind of violence. One should not succumb to an argumentum ad populum, but neither should one ascribe meaning to words that deviate too much from the common language. If we were to exclude objects from the definition of violence, we would have to try to convince the world that a crowd of Gilets Jaunes marching down the Champs-Élysées and pulverising every retail store along the way would in fact be practising non-violence – more than a conceptual stretch, a waste of rhetorical effort.

We must accept that property destruction is violence, insofar as it intentionally exerts physical force to inflict injury on a thing owned by someone who does not want it to happen (such as Rick Perry and his fellow Energy Transfer shareholders). But in the very same breath, we must insist on it being different in kind from the violence that hits a human (or an animal) in the face, for the reasons just specified: one cannot treat a car cruelly or make it cry. It has no rights truncated in the moment of incineration. Some harm befalls the person behind the car – the driver, the owner – who is prevented from using it as he wishes. But it would be something else to set fire to him. Martin Luther King – his moral compass a wonder of reliability next to Gandhi’s – endorsed this distinction in his apologia for the urban riots of 1967: ‘Violent they certainly were. But the violence, to a startling degree, was focused against property rather than against people’, and within the genus of violent acts, this made all the difference: ‘A life is sacred. Property is intended to serve life, and no matter how much we surround it with rights and respect, it has no personal being.’ Why were the rioters ‘so violent with property then? Because property represents the white power structure, which they were attacking and trying to destroy.’

On the standard view, which also seems to be King’s, an inanimate object can undergo violence by virtue of being property – standing in a relation, that is, to a human being, who can claim to be indirectly hurt when it is hurt. Shattering a rusty chassis discarded on a dumpsite would scarcely be violent, since no one would be around to sustain the loss. But this indirectness is also what sets property destruction apart, for one cannot equate the treatment of people with the treatment of the things they own. Even the man most deeply in love with his car should admit that slicing up its tyres and slicing up his lungs come with separate ethical tags. Only the most extreme form of bourgeois fetishism – claiming that the owned object is in fact animate – could muster a case against this differentiation. There is, however, one exception, one type of property destruction that approaches killing and maiming, namely that which hits material conditions for subsistence: poisoning someone’s groundwater, burning down a family’s last remaining grove of olive trees or, for that matter, firebombing a paddy field in an Indian peasant village because it emits methane would come close to a stab in the heart. At the other end of the spectrum is the blasting of a superyacht into smithereens.

Now if we accept that property destruction is violence, and that it is less grave than violence against humans, this in itself neither condemns nor condones the practice. It seems that it ought to be avoided for as long as possible. Even a revolutionary Marxist should regard it as prima facie wrong, because private property is the form in which capitalism snares productive forces that often – although at a falling rate – cater to some human needs. We would not want a situation where people went around throwing bricks into cafés and toppling school walls and slitting jackets on a whim, just for the hell of it. Highly pressing circumstances must rather be present for attacks on property to come under consideration. Then begins the act of balancing.

‘Is not a woman’s life, is not her health, are not her limbs more valuable than panes of glass?’ asked Emmeline Pankhurst. Or, in the words of one philosopher mulling over violent civil disobedience: if a grossly immoral war is being waged, the right of railway engineers to keep the tracks in good shape may be superseded by ‘the more important right of the people in the country to which the troops are headed, to life itself’. In the climate breakdown, the scales might tip quickly – on the one side, things like pipelines and diggers and SUVs; on the other, a weight that must tend towards the infinite because it encompasses all values. A woman’s life, her health and limbs, the right of a people to life itself and everything else is in peril. Because of the temporal dimension, moreover, Pankhurst’s question must also be posed from the standpoint of future generations: will those in school today or born next year grow up to think that the machines of the fossil economy were accorded insufficient respect? Or will they look back on this moment in time rather like we, or at least those of us with a modicum of feminist leanings, look back on the suffragettes and see smashed windows as a price worth paying? But when suffragettes broke panes, torched letterboxes and hammered on paintings, these things had, in and of themselves, at most a tangential relation to the problem of male monopoly on the vote. Now the machines of the fossil economy are the problem.

One might turn to contemporary scholarship on civil disobedience and political violence for further guidance. William Smith, one of the most astute theorists, has recently turned his attention to direct action along the lines of ‘occupations, sabotage, property damage and other types of force’ designed to dissuade opponents from proceeding with their plans and deter them from duplicating their efforts. He regards this taxon of action as distinct from civil disobedience, with its emphasis on moral suasion. When could it ever be justified? He sets up three criteria.

First,

quote:

direct action should be limited to disrupting practices that might result in, or imminently threaten to generate, serious and irreversible harm. The urgency of the situation might be sufficient to override a presumption in favour of lawful advocacy or civil disobedience, if too much damage would occur before the process of reflection and reconsideration triggered by the latter could run its course.

It should be noted that this argument is not tailored for the climate crisis, which receives no mention.

Second, there must be grounds for believing that mellower tactics have led nowhere, and that this lack of progress is itself a symptom of the structural depth of the ills. Third, there should be, at least ideally, some higher charter, convention or edict the wrongdoers have flouted and violated and that the activists can refer to. Thanks to three decades of institutionalised ogorrhoea, there are no scarcities here: from the UNFCCC to the Paris Agreement, not to speak of the ceremoniously promulgated national pledges and plans (at least in Europe), whole libraries’ worth of covenants and consensuses have been assembled for climate activists to pursue the felons with. But Smith concedes that all three criteria need not be fully satisfied. ‘The severity or urgency of the harm’ may be such that direct action needs no further warrant.

There is nothing madly aberrant about this radicalism; rather, the literature is replete with similar deductions. Nor is Smith alone in claiming that the right to resistance at some point can morph into a duty. In fact, once the gravity of the climate crisis is duly recognised, it is difficult to see what ethical precepts could be marshalled to keep that morphing at bay and uphold a ban on destroying the causative property. To date, no case has been made for the precedence of the physical integrity of CO2-emitting devices.

-

What of terrorism? We have seen Lanchester speculate about a scenario where people scratch SUVs with their keys and subsume it under that term. Is that appropriate? Few other concepts are as loaded with ideology or coloured by a particular moment; ‘violence’ has a history as old as the mists of time, but ‘terrorism’ can now hardly be uttered without the likes of Donalds Rumsfeld and Trump ventriloquising. Less reason, then, to make concessions to ordinary usage. If terrorism is to have any analytical substance, its core definition must be the deliberately indiscriminate killing of innocent civilians for the purpose of instilling terror or something very nearly like it. We have rejected the claim of Jessica Reznicek and Ruby Montoya to be nonviolent – should we also label them terrorists? On this definition, it would be risible.

In just war theory, the differentia specifica of terrorism, the particular moral transgression that blackens its name, is the failure to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants when killing people. Reznicek and Montoya didn’t kill combatants. They killed no one, injured nobody, touched not a hair on anyone’s head, and so they must be placed at the farthest remove from the category of terrorism. Someone who would brand them terrorists would in all likelihood refuse to extend the term to people who invest or indulge in CO2-emitting devices, thus recommending that acts that wound no living beings be deemed terrorism and acts that actually, certifiably kill people be absolved. Such conceptual abuse from the guardians of business-as-usual would not be in the slightest surprising. Indeed it seems to have already begun, in anticipation of the onset of property destruction at scale: in 2019, the Danish and Swedish intelligence services and their academic mouthpieces warned that ‘climate terrorism is on the horizon’, in the words of Magnus Ranstorp, ideological hitman of the repressive state apparatus in Sweden, who had never before spilled a public word on the climate question and did not, of course, refer to the combustion of fossil fuels. He and his fellows had acts like Reznicek’s and Montoya’s on their radar. ‘One can easily imagine’, one Danish expert opined on the activists of the third cycle, ‘that they become frustrated with a political system that does not in their eyes take this matter seriously enough, and a small portion of them might resort to violent actions’, this hypothetical scenario being sketched in May 2019. Behold the paradox.

This is obviously not to suggest that CO2 emissions should be categorised as acts of terrorism, which would also constitute conceptual abuse, although arguably of a lesser sort, insofar as blind killing is central to what terrorism is. The term should not be devaluated, the crime not trivialised. Someone who enters a mosque with the intention to kill the maximum number of worshippers is undertaking an act of terrorism; someone who drills a hole in a pipeline or sets a depot aflame performs ‘a categorically distinct act’, in the words of Steve Vanderheiden, leading philosopher of environmental ethics. One could retort that the latter also seeks to create an atmosphere of fear. Is not the idea here to terrorise capitalists into submission? But the establishment of a deterrence cannot be a sufficient condition for terrorism. It is common knowledge that the prison system exists to deter citizens from infractions of the law, by threatening to abolish their freedom of movement; closed-circuit TV cameras, armed guards and a panoply of other fully normalised phenomena have similar functions. Parents have told lurid tales, raised their voice, even smacked their children to inculcate fear for unwholesome things. All of this might be objected to; none of it can be called terrorism. The unique objective of the mosque killer is to create an atmosphere where Muslims fear for their lives and go to Friday prayer in the knowledge that they could be killed at any moment just because of who they are. Fear for the loss of property is a categorically distinct fear. It pertains to the balance sheet and budget, not the body.

Rime posted:

If "go join other climate activists in your city/area/region, plug into the climate activist community and join with them" isn't satisfying then I don't know what else to offer. Activists are working in every space imaginable from direct action blocking O&G development projects to lobbying elected officials to be better on climate to actively working to replace electeds who are bad or lukewarm on climate.

If your response to "find others who are climate activists and join them" is "those efforts don't inspire confidence" then maybe propose something yourself so we can have something to go on.

If what you need to inspire confidence is an ironclad, 100% guaranteed effective plan to save the world and avert climate catastrophe then I don't think you'll ever find it. It doesn't exist.

err posted:

is this book worth getting? looks interesting

Mike the TV posted:

and yet posting is not carbon neutral, so we are moving up the timeline with every post

Rime posted:

Elegant, simple, extremely alarming. It's like a light-bulb was just switched on in my head. This is the bowtie on the argument that growth consumer capitalism was only possible in a similarly boundless world, and now that we've hit and grossly exceeded the resource & environmental bounds of our own world an economic phase-change being forced on us is unavoidable.

http://www.energycrisis.com/hubbert/monetary.htm posted:

"Two Intellectual Systems: Matter-energy and the Monetary Culture"

(summary, by M. King Hubbert)

During a 4-hour interview with Stephen B. Andrews, SbAndrews at worldnet.att.net, on March 8, 1988, Dr. Hubbert handed over a copy of the following, which was the subject of a seminar he taught, or participated in, at MIT Energy Laboratory on Sept 30, 1981.

"The world's present industrial civilization is handicapped by the coexistence of two universal, overlapping, and incompatible intellectual systems: the accumulated knowledge of the last four centuries of the properties and interrelationships of matter and energy; and the associated monetary culture which has evloved from folkways of prehistoric origin.

"The first of these two systems has been responsible for the spectacular rise, principally during the last two centuries, of the present industrial system and is essential for its continuance. The second, an inheritance from the prescientific past, operates by rules of its own having little in common with those of the matter-energy system. Nevertheless, the monetary system, by means of a loose coupling, exercises a general control over the matter-energy system upon which it is super[im]posed.

"Despite their inherent incompatibilities, these two systems during the last two centuries have had one fundamental characteristic in common, namely, exponential growth, which has made a reasonably stable coexistence possible. But, for various reasons, it is impossible for the matter-energy system to sustain exponential growth for more than a few tens of doublings, and this phase is by now almost over. The monetary system has no such constraints, and, according to one of its most fundamental rules, it must continue to grow by compound interest. This disparity between a monetary system which continues to grow exponentially and a physical system which is unable to do so leads to an increase with time in the ratio of money to the output of the physical system. This manifests itself as price inflation. A monetary alternative corresponding to a zero physical growth rate would be a zero interest rate. The result in either case would be large-scale financial instability."

"With such relationships in mind, a review will be made of the evolution of the world's matter-energy system culminating in the present industrial society. Questions will then be considered regarding the future:

What are the constraints and possibilities imposed by the matter-energy system? human society sustained at near optimum conditions?

Will it be possible to so reform the monetary system that it can serve as a control system to achieve these results?

If not, can an accounting and control system of a non-monetary nature be devised that would be approptirate for the management of an advanced industrial system?

"It appears that the stage is now set for a critical examination of this problem, and that out of such inquries, if a catastrophic solution can be avoided, there can hardly fail to emerge what the historian of science, Thomas S. Kuhn, has called a major scientific and intellectual revolution."